Text messages are a widely used communication method. That’s why many companies create chatbots for business and entertainment. They are artificial intelligent assistants primarily built to instantly respond to clients’ requests or fulfill simple tasks within a chat.
Many worlds: This article will consider the entire chatbot development process covering its types, technologies involved, peculiarities, and more.
Chatbot Marketing Survey
A chatbot is a good and promising solution, and the statistics define this fact: the chatbot market value in 2023 is expected to be surmounted. In the same year, this solution is projected to save 5 billion hours of clients with its help. Besides, 68% of consumers enjoy chatbots since they receive a quick reply and are redirected to a human assistant for more complex questions. Moreover, domains like healthcare and banking will have chatbots helping users with 75-90% of their queries by 2024.
Trends of Chatbot Building
It’s high time to discuss the trends of chatbot creation to find out which one is more suitable for your project and its business goals. The main directions are the following:
Bots comprising such technologies are advantageous for both consumers and businesses: they provide clients with fast and efficient support on request. As a result, business owners can decrease their expenditures by 30% and help customers anytime. As a result, AI can deal with simple requests while live assistants can focus on more difficult ones.
Chatbot Types Differentiation
Chatbots can be split into two types: rule-based and AI ones. Obviously, this differentiation defines the chatbot development cost. So let’s consider both of them in detail:
Rule-Based Chatbots
An ideal option for medium and small businesses that do not require the implementation of unique mechanics, they will be enough to perform simple tasks and refer the client.
For the rule-based bot, the if/then logic is applied. The system has a row of consumers’ questions and prepares answers.
Pros:
- Optimal cost
- Safety
- Opportunity to store and transmit media files
AI Bots
This type of chatbot is capable of self-learning. Thus, it better understands clients’ goals and needs reflected in the message by analyzing it and providing more profound feedback. As a result, their responses become more relevant with frequent usage.
Pros:
- AI data analysis
- Customer behavior analysis
- Support of multiple languages
- Decision-making opportunity
Each option comprises certain advantages, so the chosen type depends on the scale of your business and its goals. For example, if your company is small, you may benefit from the first type, and if your business is more advanced, you should go for the AI chatbot.
Four Vital Steps to Create a Chatbot
Now let’s observe how the development flow of a chatbot goes:
- Think over the needs of your customers to offer an efficient solution to their pains
- Select a platform for integration with chatbots
- Hire competent developers
- Test the product and launch
Here’s a more thorough consideration of each step:
Meet the requirements of your customers
To understand what your target audience wants to get, you should conduct surveys, market research, and define a buyer persona. Thus, you’ll know your competitors and what your clients want from your product. Surveys will determine the features to include so your solution will be sought-after.
Choose a platform for chatbot integration
A chatbot is an adaptive solution that can be integrated into apps for communication. You should go for the one that is used by your target audience the most. For example, a chatbot may be built into messengers like Skype, Telegram, or Facebook Messenger.
Hire competent specialists for the chatbot development
Developers’ involvement is essential if you want to make a top-notch AI chatbot with advanced functionality dealing with complex tasks.
Define the tech stack for the development
The creation process requires frameworks for advanced and sophisticated solutions or instruments for more elementary chatbots.
Product testing and launching
Conducting numerous tests before release prevents bugs, fails, and other issues. Yet, launching doesn’t mean you don’t have to improve and enhance your product from that moment.
How to Build a Chatbot: Technology Stack
Chatbot creation requires a particular tech stack comprising solutions or frameworks for this goal. Here are the most potent and useful ones:
Solutions for chatbot making
Solutions help create innovative bots to meet all your business goals. Nevertheless, remember that they provide a bounded instrument kit, which may make a bot plain. You can find great chatbot builders below:
Botsify
This solution supports various websites, Slack, Facebook pages, etc. You can also build a bot for customer support with Botsify by applying artificial intelligence, plugins, or machine learning to Botsify.
QnA Maker
Released by Microsoft, QnA Maker can build chatbots that answer clients’ FAQs. Besides, it is self-learning and supports more than 50 languages.
ChatBot
ChatBot is an excellent tool for creating bots for messengers, Facebook pages, and websites. The benefit of this solution is the availability of pre-launching Quality Assurance testing and various templates built for different niches and purposes. In addition, it can create moving responses, including buttons and images.
Chatbot Development Frameworks
As previously mentioned, frameworks allow the creation of more sophisticated and complex chatbots.
Wit.AI
It’s an NLP framework for building and testing multilingual chatbots for messengers free of charge. What’s more, Wit.Al may be integrated with programming languages like Python, Node.js, and Ruby.
IBM Watson
This solution offers to create custom multilingual bots with more natural interaction. What’s more, IBM Watson provides a month of a free trial.
Microsoft Bot Framework
Microsoft Bot Framework is an excellent instrument for developing intelligent, scalable, highly secured talk bots. They interact with users by listening and responding to them. Products built with this framework support Slack and Skype.
BotKit
BotKit comprises various efficient plugins and libraries to implement metrics and statistics to the product, which benefits companies. It also provides branching logic, questions, and dynamic behavior.
It’s significant to mention that the whole work on your chatbot must still be finished after building it. You should train your product to build phases properly, comprehend written and spoken queries, and release updates to enhance its operation.
In addition, a great chatbot should be capable of distinguishing various noises from pronounced requests. For this, chatbots apply self-learning language and acoustic models. The language model is helpful in correctly reading and perceiving the apparent demand, whereas the acoustic model converts this query into digital data that will match keywords.
Furthermore, a chatbot should grasp and analyze human speech. It happens as follows: a chatbot compares the verbal request with learning templates applied before and defines the most relevant sense. Then, it matches the gained data with a particular information domain (retail, healthcare, logistics, and more). Lastly, a chatbot has to define the context of pronounced requests and find a suitable response.
Rule-Based Chatbots vs. Custom AI Solutions: What to Create?
As discussed, each option is more suitable for a particular business niche, so let’s find out which is ideal for yours.
The latter option is ideal for small projects, as it only requires the implementation of some functions. However, it is opposed by AI bots since their development requires significant skills and experience.
However, it doesn’t matter what type of bot you choose, it will have to be developed one way or another. Creating any IT content is a complexly structured and skill-demanding task. To release a chatbot without difficulties and potential problems, you need an experienced team. If there are already in-house developers, all that remains is to work. If there are doubts about developers’ capabilities or there simply aren’t any, we recommend contacting outsource.
Often, developers from other regions (usually Eastern Europe and Asia) set development prices much lower than more Western companies. Nevertheless, there is a risk of entrusting the creation of something to the “wrong people.” So, before signing the contract, we recommend you familiarize yourself with the company’s portfolio and the reviews of past clients in more detail. Also, take the time to contact those for whom the developers did the work. Well, remember that it is always better to entrust professionals.
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Author’s bio:
Yuliya Melnik is a technical writer at Cleveroad. It is a web and mobile app development company in Ukraine. She is passionate about innovative technologies that make the world a better place and loves creating content that evokes vivid emotions.
